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42 Miles Press author Bill Rasmovicz will be reading poems from his latest book Gross Ardor as part of the Indiana University South Bend English Department Fall Event Series on Thursday, October 17th, at 7:30pm. The reading will be on the Weikamp 3rd floor bridge.

“Perhaps Gross Ardor is what happens in a world bent on repeating the same thoughts, same horrors, and the same old consumer driven . . . if not madness, then despondency, enough to insure madness is always nearby, well within earshot, aghast, and not quietly saying what it would say. Gross Ardor goes out there beautifully insisting no, that was just one of our favorite sons trying to be divisive again. When studied long enough, all things acquire human form .. HAIL, AMERICA, VICTORIOUS! . . . You were the animal they warned you about.” —Peter Richards

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE IN THE SOUL

The little hairs in the lungs rust.
It is hard to imagine wind.
What is emptiness? A flower?
Whosoever’s body is flush with the world is a god.

Where water pools in the shade your reflection trembles.
The woman on the balcony, you imagine her from yesterday.
Vines spill from banister to cement and you swear

the baby’s eyelashes are silk, the river
tons of effluvia at once.
If anything, the soul is a series of invisible arches, mass
without weight, the smallest sense of moon-colored fortitude.

A ladder reaches the roof and keeps going.
The woman, she believes she is bread.
You too believe you are bread, that if anything
the flower is born inside out.

In the mind wild grasses pant and fold.
The broken colloquy of a hammer, thirst of trees
in your blood. The blue thread
you ease from your shirt to stitch air to air.